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Lay It as It Plays
I wrote about John Darnielle and his fabulous Mountain Goats for SF Weekly:
“I’ll tell you a very funny story,” John Darnielle says. This is probably not the first funny story he’s told today. Nor will it be the last. Today is a publicity day for Darnielle. When it’s over, he will have talked to more than a dozen members of the music press. And tomorrow, he will do it all over again. He has submitted to this grind to promote his upcoming six-date tour, which he will embark upon to remind listeners of All Eternals Deck, the hyperliterate indie folk album he put out last winter with his band the Mountain Goats.
It’s a measure of his hard-won success that the dozens of journalists who’ve requested his time have been corralled into two days of 15-minute phoners. Darnielle is less available these days than he once was. That was back before his shows became events around which a whole generation of hapless Young Werthers arranged their Moleskine planners. But today, on this warm Friday afternoon in spring, and by the grace of the songwriter’s team of publicists, we have been made captive to Darnielle. There is hardly time to follow-up on his breezily expressed pontifications. We imagine this is what it’s like to be one of his many dedicated followers.
Though after 20 years, 13 albums, and a fanbase so fervent as to warrant a feature two years ago in New York magazine, Darnielle can afford to be his own person. Much of the humor in the story he’s about to tell us hinges on that fact.
Read the entire story here.
—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter
